"The other picture? 'The Soul of Me?'"
"Of course I've seen it. It's magnificent work, Woll, but I don't like
it."
"Crude realism, eh?" he said, leaning sideways and bending a palette
knife backwards and forwards on the back of his chair.
"More," I said--"exaggeration."
He paled. I thought it was in offence at my critical presumption.
"There was none," he averred. "You shall see the original sketch," and
he paced to an easel that stood, covered with a cloth, in a distant
corner. He unveiled it.
"Ugh!" My cry was inevitable. I resisted the impulse to shroud my eyes,
but my teeth clenched on words.
It was the same picture with a terrible difference. Vivid, almost
glaring, in the black gloom and silence, the woman's form represented a
combination of all the debasement and degradation of the world. Evil
spirits seemed to mock and writhe and gibber in the sludge of the
foreground; the iridescent atmosphere hung with noisome miasmic dews,
even the face of the bargee glowed like a fiend in the glare of his
lamp, held viciously aloft to reveal in its completeness the whole
squalid history of spiritual failure.
"Who was she?" I whispered at last--it was a sight to shackle the
tongue--and his answer hissed back like the sound of searing iron on
sweating flesh:--
"It was my _wife_."
Heaven forgive me, I shrank from him. The man who could thus portray
accurately, unmercifully, this tale of hideous defilement--the victim
his wife, however sinning--must be himself either morally debased or
partially insane.
He saw the gesture, and moved away to the foot of the model throne and
waited.
I could think of nothing but the ghastly achievement, could stand only
with bulged eyes staring at it, a dry, dusty flavour parching my tongue.
At last I broke from the horrible fascination--a fascination that almost
prompted me to snatch his knife and rip the canvas from end to end.